


Bring style to the brawl

by Estelle (Fielding)



Series: B99 Season 7 Countdown Project [21]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Episode: s05e09 99, F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:08:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22345384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fielding/pseuds/Estelle
Summary: “Remember that time we went to the deli for cold cuts, and the ticket machine was broken, so you found out what time everyone arrived and made them get in a single-file line, from earliest to latest?”Just what the quote says! A missing scene from 99.
Relationships: Jake Peralta/Amy Santiago
Series: B99 Season 7 Countdown Project [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1588849
Comments: 10
Kudos: 86





	Bring style to the brawl

**Author's Note:**

> Story No. 21 of my Season 7 Countdown Project. Thank you to vickovac for the prompt!

Jake takes one look at the crowd jostling around the deli counter and says, “Maybe we should go to Hannibal’s instead.”

Manolo’s Deli is filled to bursting with people, jammed eight or nine deep up against the meat display windows, bodies pressed so close together Jake can’t even see the slabs of salami and turkey and prosciutto and other delicious cold cuts he knows are in there. Beside him Amy rises up on her toes, frowning up at the ticket number display, which is blinking a bleak “XX.”

“It’s always a little crowded on a Saturday,” Amy says, somewhat distracted. He can tell she’s trying to find the best line through the crowd to the front of the counter.

“Ames, they’re about to riot.” He’s not joking – an old woman who is for sure wearing a nightgown, robe and slippers just jabbed a Greenpoint hipster in the ribs with her cane. Up closer to the counter he can see two elderly men starting an embarrassing slap fight.

“We’re not going to Hannibal’s,” Amy says.

“Just because you found a fingernail in the ground turkey that one time-”

“You’re the one who named it Hannibal’s,” Amy says, finally looking away from the masses to glare at him. “After the cannibal.”

“I just don’t want to be murdered over cold cuts,” Jake says, reasonably.

“Jake, I promised my dad he’d get rojo-roasted pork shoulder from Manolo’s,” Amy says. She looks him dead straight in the eyes. “Are you telling me you’re not willing to throw an elbow or two for your future father in law?”

“So your dad can have a pork sandwich? Uh, no.”

Amy mutters something in Spanish under her breath, and Jake should probably be offended but he’s already starting to feel kind of bad for not having his fiance’s back. What’s that in the vows – through thick and thin, death and destruction, imported cheese and cold cuts? He’s pretty sure that’s how it goes.

Jake sighs and opens his mouth to offer to be her human shield. But then Amy grabs his upper arm, and he recognizes that death grip – along with the squaring of her shoulders, the lifting of her chin, the flaring of her nostrils. When she turns back to him her lips are pursed and she has a gleam in her eye that sends chills down his spine – the good and the scary kind.

“I have an idea,” she says. His blood runs cold.

+++

Amy has deduced, because she’s a brilliant detective slash soon-to-be sergeant (obviously), that the ticket machine has gone down and the Saturday shoppers at Manolo’s have descended into madness. Jake would have figured that out too if he hadn’t been so focused on the 8-year-old in front of him holding a bat about five inches from his crotch. (The kid’s in a LIttle League uniform so Jake is willing to let the bat go, for now. But he will absolutely take down that kid if-when the bologna starts flying.)

A trio of high school kids – two pony-tailed girls and a pale-faced boy – are working behind the counter, and they’re basically just pointing at random people in the crowd to pick the next customer. The boy has puffy eyes and appears to be actively crying. One of the two girls keeps shouting “it’s just fucking MEAT, people,” which cracks Jake up a little because it sounds like she’s talking about meat people.

“Hannibal’s probably doesn’t have a line,” Jake says to Amy. She’s stepped back from the crowd for assessment purposes and has her hands planted on her hips.

“Right, because Hannibal probably ate half his customers,” Amy says. She turns to Jake, fire in her eyes. “Here’s the plan: We find out what time everyone got here, and then line them up in order of earliest to latest. We’ll have to be at the end of the line, of course, but that’s only fair.”

Jake stares at his beautiful fiance and then stares out over the bumping, grinding, elbow-throwing crowd. He’s always been bad at counting crowd sizes but he’s sure there are at least 2,000 people in the deli.

“Ames, I love you. You are insane.”

“Do you trust me?” she says. She’s rolling up the sleeves of her floral button-down shirt.

Jake sighs, because duh. He says, “Are you sure you don’t want to call for backup, babe?”

“Just stay on my six,” Amy says.

And then she steps into the masses.

Jake does his best to keep close to her as Amy makes her way to the front of the mob, but she’s small and nimble and he gets stuck between a trio of millennial dads with babies attached to their chests. When he cranes his neck to see where she went, suddenly her head pops up from the chaos, near the counter. She’s clearly climbed on top of something because she’s a good foot taller than everyone else around her. She’s managed to tie her hair back into an efficient-looking ponytail and her cheeks are flushed with what Jake recognizes as the thrill of pending organization.

“Hey! Attention!” Amy calls out. “Settle down, people!”

One of the men with a baby yells, “Where’s my pancetta, bitch?” and Jake casually stomps on his foot.

“Here’s how things are going to go down,” Amy says, unperturbed as the crowd pushes and grumbles all around her. “Everyone is going to form a line. I’m going to ask you what time you got here and I will order you from first to last. Questions?”

The crowd yells and boos and a few people literally hiss. One woman cries out, “What if someone lies?”

“I’ll know if you’re lying to me,” Amy says, voice cold and steely. “Do not lie to me.”

Jake is suddenly extremely turned on.

The customers are still grumbling but shockingly, they’re lining up. Amy starts with the person right in front of her – an Asian woman who could be 25 or 55, Jake is seriously bad with ages – and asks what time she got to the deli. The woman opens her mouth and looks Amy in the eye, then purses her lips and looks at her feet.

“Ten minutes ago,” she says.

Amy has pulled her police notebook out of her purse. She checks her watch and jots down the time, then asks the next person, a black teenager clutching a skateboard to his chest, what time he arrived.

“Half an hour ago,” he says without hesitation.

Amy invites them to swap places. And they do.

At some point she asks – well, tells – Jake to start lining up new customers by order of arrival at the back of the shop while she handles the rest of the room. As she makes her way through the snaking line, a few shoppers pull out and offer to help keep an eye on the order. A man in a North Face puffy vest and a Patagonia trucker hat insists he’s been there for more than an hour, but when three witnesses come forward to say he arrived only a few minutes ago, Amy shames him to the back of the line. He’s the only one caught lying.

When order has been restored the crowd cheers, and someone at the front invites Amy to move all the way up and take her turn next. Amy refuses, but for the next hour that they’re waiting she is gifted a quarter pound of sopprasetta, three paper-thin slices of jamon iberico, a half dozen papa rellenas, and two packages of turrones, which she hands over to Jake because she can’t stand the way the nougat sticks to her teeth.

Jake is full by the time they get to the front of the line and place their order.

Their employee – one of the teenaged girls, who has braces and two eyebrow piercings and a scar on the side of her neck – nods at Amy and says, “That was badass, lady. Thought we were gonna have to call the cops.”

Amy just grins at her and says, “It was my pleasure.”

Jake knows that she really means it.

**Author's Note:**

> *Title is from IHOP (Bash Brothers).
> 
> *In Charge Amy is so fun to write.


End file.
